WARSAW, February 10, /ITAR-TASS/. The authorities in the town of Nowy Sacz, the Lesser Poland province in southern Poland, plan to relocate a WWII Soviet memorial cemetery and liquidate a Red Army monument located on its territory, the local media reported on Monday.

Governor Jan Brodowski said they had received consent for transferring the remains of Soviet soldiers buried in the grave to the local municipal cemetery. He explained that the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, that regulates such matters in Poland, had informed the Russian side of its intentions to exhume the remains in the next six months and had not received any protest letters from Russia.

“We regard it as a silent consent to such actions,” the governor said.

However, Vyacheslav Polovinkin, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry department responsible for the protection of Russian war memorials in Poland, told Itar-Tass that the Russian side had asked the Polish side for technical documentation proving the need to relocate the remains but had not received any papers so far. He assured that no exhumation would take place without Russia’s consent.

He added that his department, the Russian embassy in Warsaw and the Russian general consulate in Gdansk were trying to prevent the destruction of a monument to Soviet WWII General Ivan Chernyakhovsky. It was unveiled in the town of Pieni··no in the 1970s in a place where the general received a fatal wound on February 18, 1945.